The Korean Boxing Association will leave the International Boxing Association (IBA), which has been stripped of its Olympic management rights, and join World Boxing (WB), the new mainstream boxing organization.
“The Korean Boxing Association decided to join the newly formed international boxing organization, World Boxing, at an extraordinary congress of delegates held yesterday in Ulsan, South Korea,” the association said in a statement.
“This decision follows the expulsion of the IBA from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in April, and the Korean Boxing Association has decided to strengthen cooperation with World Boxing to develop international boxing and maintain boxing as an Olympic sport,” the organization said.
The IBA, which was founded in 1946 under the French acronym “AIBA,” came into disrepute at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics following allegations of referee bias and poor management.
This, coupled with match-fixing, financial difficulties, and the appointment of a former drug offender as the new president, led to the IOC suspending the IBA as an Olympic organizing International Federation (IF) in 2019.
As a result, the IOC took over the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 and Paris 2024, from selecting athletes to organizing the Games themselves.
Relations with the IOC deteriorated further in 2020 when Russian Umar Kremlev became the new president.
He overturned the international sports community’s ban on Russian and Belarusian athletes from international competition following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, allowing athletes from both countries to compete in boxing matches and fly their flags.
In June of last year, the IOC decided to withdraw the IBA’s recognition as an international organization after it failed to address governance, finance, and ethics issues.
In response, the IBA filed a complaint with the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), which was dismissed in March of this year.
The IBA appealed to the Swiss Federal Court earlier this month.
World Boxing, which the Korean Boxing Association applied to join, is an organization led by the United States and the United Kingdom that was established after the IBA was expelled from the IOC.
“We decided to join World Boxing in order to help boxing stay in the Olympic program,” said an official from the Korean Boxing Association.
